Educational Clarity Writing

Apply ../00-blog-writing-guardrails/SKILL.md first; its gates apply to every post before the guidance below.

1. Plain-language foundation

• Organize the explanation around the reader's task ("how do I do X," "what does X mean for me"), not around the writer's own expertise or the order the writer learned the material. [DIGITALGOV-PLAIN-01]
• Use short sentences and everyday words by default; introduce a technical term only when the concept has no everyday equivalent, and define it the first time it appears. [DIGITALGOV-PLAIN-01]
• A plain-language pass must not delete technical precision the target audience actually needs; simplify wording, not the substance of the claim. [DIGITALGOV-PLAIN-01]

2. Readability-formula mechanics and limits

• The Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level formulas estimate difficulty from sentence length and syllables per word, calibrated against reader comprehension test data; treat a grade-level score as an approximation of decoding difficulty, not a certificate of comprehension. [NAVY-READABILITY-01]
• Because the formulas were derived and calibrated on average sentence and word length statistics against one test population, do not treat a target score (e.g. "grade 8") as sufficient proof a specific audience will understand the post; a passage can score low on grade level while still being conceptually dense, ambiguous, or jargon-heavy. [NAVY-READABILITY-01]
• Use a readability score only as one editing signal alongside direct reader testing or subject-matter review, and re-verify long or restructured sentences by reading them aloud, not by chasing a numeric target alone. [NAVY-READABILITY-01][DIGITALGOV-PLAIN-01]

3. Cognitive load gate

• Working memory that processes new information is limited; when the intrinsic difficulty of the material plus the way it is presented exceeds that capacity, learning fails even though every individual fact was stated correctly. [SWELLER-COGLOAD-01]
• Reduce load the presentation itself adds: do not force the reader to hold an undefined term, an unresolved forward reference, or a separated diagram-and-caption pair in memory while decoding a sentence. [SWELLER-COGLOAD-01]
• Sequence a teaching post from the smallest complete sub-concept to the next, adding one new element at a time rather than introducing several interdependent concepts in the same paragraph. [SWELLER-COGLOAD-01]